I have a new Pearl and the delete was working fine until last week. Here is what happens:

1. I delete on my handheld including accept the confirmation
2. The email remains on the handheld in my inbox
3. Email is moved to the Trash folder in my Lotus Notes desktop
4. When I empty trash, the email still remains on my handheld - I cannot do anything to get rid of it!!

I have spoken to both Tmobile and my helpdesk. Tmobile had me remove the SIM and battery and pushed some updated settings to the device. My helpdesk deleted my service books and repushed.

Things seem to be working fine for now, but I was wondering if anyone else had this problem and knows the root cause?

The Solution
The solution is really a two-part solution - but (so far) it seems to work every time this problem occurs.

First, you need to go into your Blackberry Desktop Manager (BBDM), and go to Backup and Restore, then click Advanced, then select Messages in the right pane (see below).

Once you have selected Messages, click the Clear button, then Close. Go ahead and close out of Backup and Restore, close BBDM, and disconnect your Blackberry.

Second, you need to go into your Blackberry Email Options, then go into Email Reconciliation. Turn off Wirless Reconcile, close out. Let it sit for 30 seconds. Then go back into Email Reconciliation, and turn Wireless Reconcile back on, close out.

That's it! That should fix your emails so that all future emails can be deleted. You can verify that this fix worked because the little icons will be back to envelope icons, not folder icons - oh, and you can delete them again.

Hopefully this will help someone else avoid the hair-pulling I went through when this problem would surface. It also lets you know when the problem occurs so you can be ready for it and can fix it right after you upgrade your mail database design.

BTW, I am going to share this with the Blackberry folks at RIM so that they can look into it and (hopefully) fix it so this problem doesn't occur to begin with.

Any other Blackberry fixes we should know about? Please share them here!

UPDATE: It turns out that there is a Blackberry KBase article on this very problem - KB11860. It basically says what I say here, except that it indicates you must be running Blackberry Enterprise Server 4.1 Service Pack 3 Hotfix 1 or later for the workaround above to work. (Thanks to John Wargo of RIM for letting me know that a KBase article exists about this!)